On October 30, counsel for Dr. Stephen Thaler requested that the U.S. Supreme Court hold its Petition for Certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter until after the Court rules on the matter of the dismissal of Copyright Office Director Shira Perlmutter by the White House in May. As the letter states, “The Blanche and Slaughter cases consider whether Director Perlmutter, a ...
Over the weekend, I had the privilege of participating in the 11th annual Mosaic Conference, organized by the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ) and hosted by Suffolk University Law School IP Center. Founded by Professor Lateef Mtima at Howard University, IPSJ’s mission is to “…examine intellectual property law and policy—as well as the IP regime in total—to ...
Many arguments advocating the view that AI training does not conflict with copyright rights share a common fallacy, namely that AI outputs represent “competitive” works that copyright law was intended to promote. This error appears in Judge Alsup’s opinion in Bartz et al. v. Anthropic AI, in a report published by AI Progress, and in an amicus brief filed by ...
Patrick Gallaher at Public Knowledge recently posted an article about AI training with protected works, proposing to distinguish between piracy and fair use. Not to begin on a pedantic note, but the article is subtitled “Words Matter” because it claims that piracy is a provocative, non-legal term, so I have to respond by saying this is wrong. Although we think ...
If you follow copyright matters, it would be impossible not to read commentary proclaiming either that copyright is “dead” in the age of artificial intelligence or that confronting AI exposes copyright’s philosophical underpinnings as a convenient fiction. There is nothing new about copyright skeptics claiming that its humanist principles are a fiction, but now that machines can produce material that ...
